Shapeshift Operations with Jon Shapeshift

A financial exchange is an operationally intensive business. You have customers making a high volume of transactions, your service has to be low latency and highly available, and you are dealing with a lot of money. A cryptocurrency exchange has all of the complexity of a typical financial exchange–and then some additional complexity.

Shapeshift is a cryptocurrency exchange that allows users to buy and sell digital assets–Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and lots of other currencies. Shapeshift also has a set of tools and APIs that allow developers to build higher level applications that transact in cryptocurrencies. Shapeshift’s CEO is an early cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Erik Voorhees, who will appear on the show in the near future.

Today’s guest Jon is the COO of Shapeshift–he handles the operations of the company. He prefers not to use his last name, because Shapeshift is particularly sensitive to social engineering attacks. We’ll get into why that is in the episode–and explore lots of other topics too. How to scale a cryptocurrency exchange, the products Shapeshift offers, and some of the near-death experiences that Shapeshift has had. After all–it is a startup, and every startup has moments where it seems like the company will die.

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